Financially Set, Grandparents Help Keep Families Afloat, Too

By TAMAR LEWIN

Published: July 14, 2005

When he got home from a three-day school camping trip last winter, Schuyler Duffy, a 10th grader at Friends Seminary, told his parents he had had a fantastic time and thanked them for sending him to that Manhattan private school.

They reminded him that it was his grandparents who deserved the thanks.

''We want Schuyler to appreciate that if my dad weren't paying the tuition, we probably wouldn't have been able to swing it,'' said Schuyler's mother, Christine Wade.

Schuyler's grandparents, who live in Oakland, Calif., cushion their grandson's life in other ways, too, paying for his summer French program in Nova Scotia and helping with the purchase of an apartment when his family was evicted from a rent-stabilized apartment in Tribeca.

It has become familiar news that grandparents are rearing millions of American children whose parents are lost to drugs, mental illness or prison. What has been less noticed -- and less studied -- is that even where the parents are present and functioning, grandparents play important roles in their grandchildren's lives. Some, like Ms. Wade's parents, cover the costs for tuition and real estate down payments. Others pay for summer camps, family vacations and braces. And some, with more young mothers working, care for the grandchildren a day a week or more.

For many American families, intergenerational help is now moving in a new direction. ''Thirty, 40 years ago, the money went up: you helped your grandparents, you bought them this or that, they might have moved in with you,'' said Timothy M. Smeeding, a professor of public policy at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. ''But now, all the money comes down. Most elderly people today are better off than they thought they would be, with the booming stock market of the 1990's, the rising value of homes and the changes in Social Security. Meanwhile, their kids are worse off than they thought they would be. So grandparents help out.''

Vern Bengtson, a sociologist and gerontologist at the University of Southern California, says the growing involvement of grandparents has been just as dramatic a change in American family life as the unraveling of the nuclear family. While sociologists in recent decades have bemoaned the high divorce rate and the percentage of children born to single mothers, Professor Bengtson said, they have for the most part overlooked the emergence of grandparents as an important resource for family support and stability.

''For many Americans, multigenerational bonds are becoming more important than nuclear family ties for well-being and support over the course of their lives,'' he said.

There is, of course, nothing new about grandparents helping to support their children's families; one way or another, grandparents have always pitched in. But as demographic changes have reshaped life paths both for older people and their adult children, the influence of grandparents has expanded.

Perhaps because American culture places such emphasis on independence, many people express discomfort about discussing intergenerational help given or received. In dozens of interviews, grandparents said they did not want their names used because they worried that it would embarrass their children or did not want their grandchildren to know what they were paying for.

''You'll have to ask my son whether he's comfortable having this in the newspaper,'' a Manhattan grandmother said.

That son said no; like many others in the middle generation, he did not want it known that he was not his family's sole support.

The near-taboo on the subject, Professor Bengtson said, indicates a cultural lag, with the prevailing norms and attitudes trailing far behind what is actually going on.

The very presence of grandparents in their grandchildren's lives is far more common than it used to be. The likelihood that a 20-year-old these days will have a living grandmother (91 percent) is higher than the likelihood that a 20-year-old in 1900 had a living mother (83 percent), according to an analysis by Peter R. Uhlenberg, a professor at the University of North Carolina. And, while 40 years ago, 29 percent of Americans over 65 lived below the poverty line, by 2003 poverty among the elderly had declined by nearly two-thirds.

At the same time, this generation of 20- and 30-somethings are taking longer to finish their education and reach self-sufficiency. ''Our culture has changed so that education is priced so high, and lasts so long, that this phenomenon of economic dependency lasts much longer than it used to,'' said Professor Bengtson, himself a grandfather who goes to Santa Barbara each week to spend a day or two with his year-old granddaughter, Zoe Paloma Lozano.

Professor Bengtson has measured the growing involvement of grandparents with the college students he teaches. For 20 years, he has been giving his students a questionnaire on how they are financing college; in just the last few years, grandparents' contributions have displaced jobs and borrowing and moved into third place, after parental help and scholarships.